Michelle Obama isn't quite the orator her husband is, but she showed last night that she can hold her own on the big stage. Amy and I were talking about it last night, and she pointed out something I found very interesting. She noticed that the audience for the speech wasn't her husband's most excited constituency; her speech was directed at her mother's generation. It was a speech that cast both her husband's success and her own as the natural outgrowth of the struggles that both civil rights activists and second-wave feminists brought to the forefront in the sixties. It was particularly telling given that Ted Kennedy, one of the most prominent links to that period, had given an impassioned speech of his own.

It was an interesting night--even the overly cute ending where Malia and Sasha got hold of the microphone worked, I think, though you can be sure that some wingnuts will reach for their fainting couches over the fact that the children were not raised in the Milford School philosophy, where children are neither seen nor heard.